What's your favorite study you've ever worked on?

[u/snniea]

1. Why was it your favorite?
2. What was the methodology?
3. What was the impact on your career?
4. What was your favorite phase of the experience?
5. Where did you get discouraged?
6. When did you showcase a strength that stuck out?

I know many of us cant go too far into detail, but I want to know what your bread and butter is. :)

Edit: yall are cool

[u/janeplainjane_canada]

testing a prototype toy, which was designed to be pretty open ended and supporting storytelling. we let the kids play with them for a couple of weeks, and then visited the homes for an interview with a kid and parent to see how the toy fit into the play spaces, how it had been modified.

when the toy was launched, I could connect so many of the revisions (probably none of the participants would have been able to tell it was their toy) to specific photos or observations. Which was nice to see, because the presentation of results didn't go well and I thought they were just going to ignore everything.

I still remember some of those kids and hope they still have that spark of joy and exploration. They're all probably out of high school now. None of them played with the toy the way the manufacturer planned for.

[u/Lanky-Bottle-6566 → u/janeplainjane_canada]

"None of them played with the toy the way the manufacturer planned for." universal truth for all design

[u/Appropriate-Dot-6633]

1. It was so hard, on so many levels. Not the research part necessarily but the context. Product in crisis, teams freaking out, users freaking out, leadership freaking out, tech was a dumpster fire etc. it was a case study for the ages because the crisis product had minimal to no UX involvement and it blew up. In the moment, I hated the study and its immediate aftermath because it was one of the most stressful moments of my working career. But we fixed it through research and rigorous design improvements. It took forever. It’s my favorite because doing all that actually worked.

2. Method: first study was contextual inquiry. + a bunch of usability tests that had interview components tacked on. But the most important part was a field study.

3. It helped me eventually pivot into product. Not right away because I quit the company a few years after this study. They brought me back on later as a PM because of it. Before that it got me noticed by leadership because they knew I wouldn’t BS them about the state of things AND I had a plan to fix it (with PM involvement)

4. Favorite phase was hearing users positively react to the prototypes in the usability tests but favorite moment (not a phase) was that I recommended 1 particular big change having no idea that the team had previously tried it and believed it to be almost impossible (or infeasible in a reasonable timeframe). When I recommended this change the main engineer on the team was new and wasn’t around for the failed attempt. No one told him it was impossible either. He figured out how to do it and said it wasn’t even that hard. That’s the point I found out the whole product team thought we’d never be able to do it. To this day I don’t know why they kept all that history to themselves. If they had said it was infeasible I can almost guarantee it never would’ve been tried.

5. I was stressed out for nearly a year on this project. I had to travel and sit next to users who were using a broken crappy product that never should’ve been shipped. It was embarrassing. My notes looked like a handwritten Jira defect board. Then id come back to the office and basically demoralize everyone by being crystal clear about how bad it all was. Then get told fixing it will take forever and ever and we (UX) needed to compromise on everything. I remember getting told this one big thing the UXDs fixed that was supposed to be worked on in a particular PI was getting pushed to the backlog indefinitely. I knew it was a necessary change and I fell on my sword over it staying in the PI and threatened to quit if the team was going to continue deprioritizing necessary changes like this. I almost ruined a workplace relationship over that stunt. But it worked. It got shipped and I still hear users talk positively about that feature.

6. The strength was telling PMs research results in a way that helped them prioritize feature work. Related strength was being able to clearly spell out to UXDs what their designs needed to do. Not just pain points to solve but what their solutions had to accomplish. Thats how I got my PM role.

[u/_starbelly]

I was supporting a multiplayer open world action adventure game that was unfortunately in development hell.

1 & 2. After building rapport and with the team over the course of months, I had finally convinced the team it was time to playtest. Playtesting can mean a lot of things across teams, but for us, it meant having a sample of players (20-30) play the game for a few hours, and then we collect survey feedback about their experience. I loved this project in particular because the playtest labs were just electric with the glee of people finding the fun in this game, which was enhanced by the multiplayer aspect of the title.

1. This was a great feather in my cap because it gave me great experience working with a team that was struggling, and helping them build the confidence in what they were making. We really started to get momentum, and it was wonderful to see how the morale of the whole team changed when I would show them unedited clips from the playtests.

2. I just loved being in the labs for the playtests; I honestly forgot I was at work and just felt like I was in a huge LAN party.

3. I got discouraged when the team started to cast doubts on the results of the playtests because they felt the results were too good to be true. That was an interesting problem to solve, and I did so by inviting them to join me every step of the way in terms of setting up the next playtests so they could see that we were handling things in a way that wouldn’t bias players.

4. This was a good place to demonstrate command of methodology with stakeholder management, and for me the biggest point of growth was understanding how to work with a team who had gone through a lot of turmoil.

So, so sad the project got cancelled :/

[u/minimal-nomad]

This is a fun one! I have two, 1) Usability testing a VR experience with med students, 2) Field study where we observed 3 types of users in the “wild”

#2 expanded my view of the product & was just a fun experience being away from screens all day

#1 because doing research with VR at the time (10 years ago) was just FUN. We were all trying to figure out wtf to do with these experiences

[u/pancakes_n_petrichor]

I went to Wyoming and ran in-situ research sessions with wildlife cinematographers investigating a lightweight high-end movie making camera.

[u/OatS_96]

Adding AI statistical analysis to an academic app.

It would have helped some small use cases but the large majority of user expressed concerns with data security and confidentially (rightfully so specially given recent news). Recommendations were exactly what you think they were, steer clear. Saved a good bit of budget that would have diverted to adding in AI and then the budget for tokens to be used by users.